Modern political theory has divorced modern society from Aristotelian ethics, devalued the validity of moral absolutism, and has created a variety of interminable moral disagreements inside and outside of academia today. Specifically, contemporary morality champions the theory of moral relativism which posits that moral judgements are true or false only from a subjective standpoint and that no standpoint has privilege over others. Under the auspices of moral relativism, the topic of moral responsibility haunts issues of collective action now that moral ambivalence and ambiguity have become norms within society. The purpose of this thesis is to sociologically analyze how moral responsibility can govern, shape, and transform issues of collective action for the benefit of communal interest. Sociological analysis is used as a tool to uncover how prosocial cultures may be established, maintained, and encouraged through the mechanisms of moral and collective responsibility. The contemporary study of prosocial motivation centers around social psychology which fails to holistically explain the gulfs between moral meanings, individual sensibilities, and social action. By bringing sociology into conversation with moral responsibility, the necessary connections between compliance, normativity, and group membership become visibly explicit. My sociological contribution to the study of moral responsibility and prosocial motivation looks to everyday recreational spaces like skateboarding, online multiplayer video gaming, and the popular music industry in order to ground abstract ethical discussion in real-life social processes. I discover how the iii prosocial motivation inherent within moral responsibility can not only create representations of ethical authority but can also be utilized by institutions to solve issues of collective responsibility where individuals and groups interact interchangeably. Additionally, I offer new avenues of sociological investigation which call into question the ethical responsibility of popular music artists and high-level video game celebrities for advancing the public good. Coupling sociological analysis with aspects of moral responsibility proves to be an effective method of understanding how individual senses of morality may be synchronized with communal ethics within issues of collective action. The task of ascertaining objective notions of our moral world should continue to be a goal of analytical philosophy, and my sociological construction of the Compliance Problem could aid in this research. This thesis could be advanced by moral objectivists who hold that right and wrong exist independently of subjectivity. Discovering new objective methods of ethical study could contribute to uncovering what contemporary morality has become... or maybe even what it should be.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24028